How is it possible Tivo still doesn't have a way to do this? Their developers waste their time on stupid apps and not something that would make people more likely to upgrade to a new model?

I received email today for a promo code to upgrade my Premiere to Roamio with up to $200 off, and I considered it, but then I thought what a giant pain it was when I upgraded to the Premiere from a Series 2 and lost years worth of thumb ratings. It sounds like all I can transfer are my recordings and my season passes?

Maybe there's some unsupported way to do this? Or should I just figure that my Premiere is good enough for now and hope that maybe by the time Roamio is replaced they'll finally provide something useful in a software update, instead of a new UI for Netflix or once again ignoring some of the long standing bugs in basic functionality?

I wouldn't mind having 4 tuners, once in a while I have conflicts with 2, and I could use a bit more hard drive space. But I guess I don't want those things enough to be forced to start fresh again. Does Tivo really gain more sales having a Youtube app than they lose from loyal customers who think like I do? I doubt it.

They really need a migration progress. Something in Guided Setup that tells it to copy all settings, SPs, thumbs, etc... from another TiVo on your network. Or at the very least some PC software for advanced users.

You can't migrate anything over. Totally stupid. Can you imagine what the smartphone market would be like if you couldn't migrate address books and such to new phones?

You should be able to migrate recordings too. I believe the spirit of the No Copy bit is that there's only one usable copy of a recording. Copying a show from one TiVo to another such that the recording is disabled/deleted on the source TiVo would not violate that spirit.

There are functions available but TiVo doesn't expose them for us to use via RPC (insufficient authentication). For channels I implemented the next best thing which is you can export channel lineup from an existing TiVo and it will write out a spreadsheet containing both channels you receive and channels you do not receive as 2 separate sections. So with a new TiVo you can then use the spreadsheet as a reference to more quickly go through all channels that need to be removed or added.

For thumbs I never paid much attention as I don't use suggestions but I think it's the same problem - functions available but not exposed for us to use.

There are functions available but TiVo doesn't expose them for us to use via RPC (insufficient authentication). For channels I implemented the next best thing which is you can export channel lineup from an existing TiVo and it will write out a spreadsheet containing both channels you receive and channels you do not receive as 2 separate sections. So with a new TiVo you can then use the spreadsheet as a reference to more quickly go through all channels that need to be removed or added.

For thumbs I never paid much attention as I don't use suggestions but I think it's the same problem - functions available but not exposed for us to use.

Which means TiVo has a way to access those functions and should be able to add the functionality to an app or the TiVo UI. I know people don't upgrade often, but it would still be a really nice feature to have. Especially if they could add a "move" feature for shows that could bypass the CCI byte.

OK, perhaps YOU don't mind losing hundreds or thousands of ratings. And maybe YOU only have a failure every 4 to 6 years. That doesn't make it trivial to many people.

As a relatively new TiVo customer coming from Windows Media Center, I agree that this is TOTALLY unacceptable for TiVo to not allow us a means of migrating settings from an existing box. One of my favorite features of TiVo is suggestions and therefor I have spent many hours training it to know what I like via thumb ratings. The thought of having to do this again because of an upgrade or system failure is concerning to me to say the least. I can't imagine it would require a great deal of coding to create an online utility similar to scheduling recordings which would backup TiVo settings on a routine basis and allow us to restore them to a new box seamlessly. That's why it is so VERY important that we as paying customers, let TiVo know how we feel, otherwise it will be a very low priority on their to-do list...

That's why it is so VERY important that we as paying customers, let TiVo know how we feel, otherwise it will be a very low priority on their to-do list...

I believe the point is that TiVo have been told this repeatedly for more than a decade and they still haven't gotten the message. Apparently increasing revenue and profit by making it painless to upgrade to newer hardware does not matter to them. A company that doesn't care about revenue or profit is beyond caring about what its customers want.